Academies Rising

Over the last two years, Vitol Ghana has donated $40,000 to Rising Academies in support of a rollout of Rori, an innovative piece of ed-tech. Rori is an AI-powered chatbot that provides personalised maths tutoring to any student, on any phone. It was built by Rising Academy Network (“Rising”), a B-Corp with deep knowledge of the education sector in West Africa, and a track-record for delivering outstanding learning outcomes for students.

Addressing a need for personalised tutoring across low and middle income countries is enormous and Rori provides a low-cost, scalable solution. Students are able to converse with Rori on their phone in natural language via WhatsApp, SMS or Web-App. Rori asks students practice questions and understands their answers. It then automatically adapts its content to find the right level of difficulty. Students progress at their own pace. As they demonstrate mastery, Rori takes them through progressively more complex sequences of questions. If they get stuck, Rori provides explanations of key concepts from Rising Academies’ curriculum library. Each time a student engages with Rori, it picks up where they left off, increasing engagement and establishing a durable, friendly rapport between the bot and the student.

The Rori chatbot has been so far had 16,000 interactions from children in Ghana, with children spending an average of 53 minutes learning by talking to Rory.